> I have no real incentive to be polite or to put much effort into anything I say. Even my reputation will remain intact – who’s going to witness it?
> When communities grow to a certain size, people no longer expect to interact in the future, and thus are more likely to defect – to be petty, mean, aggressive, and to put little effort into their contributions.
If this is true, then HN should put users karma score next to their username when they post.
Karma on HN doesn't work. I've been here 500 days, but because I only post from time to time I only have 335 karma and I can't downvote. Since my karma per post is just over 2, that means I've only made ~150 comments in that span, one every three days.
So all the politics posts get upvotes from people who have enough karma to upvote, but not enough downvotes because people like me can't downvote.
In this way you can post a liberally biased article and all the Democrats will upvote it and the Republicans can't downvote it. So you get several hundred upvotes on your submission.
There are enough new members that can't downvote who have the ability to upvote to put any garbage article on the front page as long as it appeals to enough of them to overpower the people who consider the article not to belong on HN.
I could post some political garbage every day and get a huge karma/post score. At least 10 per each link submission which is more than 4x what I'm getting just commenting.
I think karma scores have a negative impact on sites, because they encourage people to post agreeable (or antagonistic), shallow content. Reddit is an easy example of this. There are 'karma whores', which just try to accumulate as many (or few) points as possible, on the site, which negatively impact actual discussion.
Hacker News tracks average-karma-per-post, which if it was the only metric available to the user, might be a good fix for this problem. You'd still get feedback on how people perceive your comments overall, but it couldn't turn into a competition over points.
Does anyone know of any websites that have implemented such a system?
> When communities grow to a certain size, people no longer expect to interact in the future, and thus are more likely to defect – to be petty, mean, aggressive, and to put little effort into their contributions.
If this is true, then HN should put users karma score next to their username when they post.